Free pen holders – getcha some
Inspired by addictive blog Apartment Therapy – and an OCD-need to keep my pens in separate homes – I set out recently to make my own pen holders:
- One for pencils
- One each for blue, black and red pens
- One for highlighters
- One for Sharpies
…you get the sorry idea.
What do you think?
From humble cans of coconut milk to centre stage and totally useful.
Get your own:
- Choose some wrapping paper or something delightful
- Measure the can’s circumference & height, cut your paper to size
- Stick a length of double-sided tape to one edge of the paper & wrap around
- Seal the other end of paper to the can with some more tape
2 minutes flat!
(If I had a little more Martha in me [Blue Peter skills for Brits] I might change them up for the seasons. I’ll leave that up to you!)
Feeling bendy? Try this office yoga
The lovely Esther at Yogatic offers daytime relief to cube monkeys and work-at-home-types alike – though I might give it a miss at the Starbucks mobile office. Close your eyes and count forward to Friday….
Love your laptop? 4 ways to keep it safe
Keep your laptop safe from thieves
Here’s my own happened-to-a-friend-of-a-friend urban myth:
A man’s using his laptop on a train – sitting in the seats that face others across a table. As the train pulls into the station, the man turns to his briefcase to put his iPod away. Before he can realise what’s happening, the respectable-looking man seated across has snatched his laptop & sprinted off the train.
Far-fetched? Not if we believe TechWire’s story. (And I’d never underestimate the appeal of a perfect, shiny Macbook Pro).
When working in public
As a San Francisco cop asks in this article,
“Where else do you have a thousand-dollar item sitting on a table in a coffee shop?”
Ding ding ding!
Keep your laptop tethered with a steel cable lock*. I have a few. I keep one in my favourite suitcase, another in my let’s-go-to-Starbucks backpack and one in an oversized handbag. Whatever I leave the house with – I’ve always got a laptop lock with me.
When staying in a hotel
If it fits, lock your laptop in the safe whenever you leave your room. Otherwise, lock it to a piece of furniture with a cable lock. This can be tricky with hotel furniture – but the laptop attached to a heavy chair will look far less appealing than the one left on the desk next door.
At the airport X-ray machine
Another horrible hypothetical:
Thieves working as a pair stand in front of their victim in line. After Thief 1 goes through the metal detector, Thief 2 sets the machine off and holds up the line as he gets searched. Meanwhile, Victim’s laptop has already gone through the X-ray and Thief 1 helps himself. He presumably beats a hasty exit out of the terminal – the ‘Catch Me If You Can’ details are fuzzy.
Better safe than sorry? Hang on to your laptop until the last second – putting it on the conveyor only when the path is clear to walk straight through.
1 more laptop safety tip
Staysafeonline cleverly advises to pretend your laptop is a wad of cash (a very thick wad, in most cases). Treat it likewise.
*Laptops have a security slot into which a combination lock with steel cable fits. Loop it around something heavy (e.g. a table leg), insert into the slot & lock. It’s a theft deterrent only – they can be ripped from the laptop casing but ruin the thief’s chance of selling it.
Expensive office storage? I think not.
Boxes and buckets. Does life get better? Nope.
My absolute favourite section of Ikea – I type erratically as heart palpitates – is the ‘office organisation’ area. The boxes & buckets section.
In most Ikea stores – I’ve studied this – you enter Mecca after escaping the food court disaster. Run from fat kids shoving 50¢ hot dogs down their throats and fly down a staircase, then around a corner. There, angels, sing.
It’s heaven. Neat white shapes and perfect clear boxes. Stuff to store other stuff in.
Boxes and buckets that stack!
And make your life better!
My local Ikea is an easy drive or train ride away, so my boxes-and-buckets collection approaches an I. Marcos level of excess. I’ve got the lot. (Hey, I work at home, it’s an easily justified addiction – my office is corralled and cannot spread).
Yet, while I love the concept of storing-stuff-in-other-stuff – my cheap-o student relics looked both cheap & ugly. Definitely low-end Ikea. Didn’t really mesh with my creative-r-than-thou aesthetic.
The cheap hack for cheap Ikea
As luck would have it, on a recent rainy-day trawl through a local antique shop, I found a box of old books & notebooks in a back room. Amongst it was a pre-WWII book report, done in fountain pen, from a fellow UBC student. Very cool – and very musty – history.
“Is Germany Prosperous?” the 40-page essasy asked, dissecting a book published in 1922.
Antique buffs, look away now.
$5 later, the relic was on its way home with me – detouring first to a craft shop where I picked up some mod podge glue.
A few hours of delightful cutting & pasting, Billie Holiday in the background for effect, and I had brand new office storage. Ta da!!!
I can’t tell you of the author’s ruling as to German prosperity – his handwriting was hard to read – but I love the result. Not only inheriting a strange piece of my university’s history, but a great makeover for under $10.
What do you think?
You did what? Oh, you dummy.
It was a perfect afternoon for sunshine, chirping birds, fantastic iced coffee – an ideal ambiance.
It, too, was the day I’d work 3 hours on a document without saving it.
Yep, 3 hours. Without saving it.
Without. Saving it. (Stop laughing).
As anyone who’s ever lost that pages-long email just before sending it will understand – what I’d written was good. A dead ace.
With a groovy combination of Joss Stone & The Kinks, we’d covered – as a team – 14 pages of fantastique. Not one word of which I’d saved.
“You had me, you lost me,” the file smirked, disappearing into the ether.
I was left alone, bereft. Just me & my Sunny Afternoon.
Didn’t think it was possible to work that long without some sort of auto-save kicking in, did you?
Yea, well, tremble with fear if you’re a Mac user with iWork’s Pages. It can’t, won’t, doesn’t auto-save. Turns out Word’s auto-save isn’t much to shout about, either.
Dial up these presets & preferences – a little “anti-stupid” campaign. It happens to the best of us, I can now assure you.
Word auto-recover
- Lots of technical looking stuff for Windows users, c/o their Microsoft Big Daddy. Note that their offering is an auto recover – not an auto save.
iWork Pages add-ons
- Download WorkSaver
- Buy ForeverSave (US$9.99)
- And enjoy the ultimate irony that the wee TextEdit app (Apple’s notepad equivalent) has a fantastic auto-save.
We know the ideal solution – save the bloody thing! So, whilst on the subject, peruse further….
Safety first!
- Web Worker Daily on playing (and winning) at DIY tech support
- More Web Worker Daily on backing up your social media (god forbid you lose a tweet)
- Barkings warns that your iPhone recovery plan might need another look
- Michael Gray’s version of doomsday prep – how to back up pretty much everything
Applaud me for typing this with one hand. The other has been – and forever will be – permanently attached to “Ctrl + S”.
Signing off good & humbled,
Lauren
The view from my dashboard – 4 widgets I love
It’s been a good month for proselytising. I convinced my brother – Mac skeptic – to make the switch. And he’s never going back.
I didn’t realise I was evangelising – just little squeals here and there as I fell more and more in love with my Macbook.
We’d sit like duelling geeks at a coffee shop – he on his Toshiba, me on my Mac.
He’d swear under his breath at a naughty machine – a refrain common to Windows users…. Opposite, I’d hum, whistle or sway deliriously – I was in looooove.
I guess one day he realised it didn’t have to be like that. He just about floored me after announcing, “I’m joining your club. Meet my new baby.” Oh, it was shiny.
It was a good lesson in sales pitching – I couldn’t convert the unconvertible. Wasted breath. But my sustained enthusiasm – a kid with an annual pass to Disneyland – was evangelical gold.
To welcome my baby brother to the club – I’d like to present my apple Dashboard – and 4 widgets I love.
World Clock – with customised cities
Seems obvious….and yet! It’s oh-so-clever.
Using Mac OS X Hints’ instructions, you’re able to customise any of your numerous world clock widgets – in-built with OS X.
Fancy spelunking in your Mac?
A few troubleshooting bits that I (not techie) ran into while following their advice:
- Finding the java script files…. they’re under your hard drive’s library – not your home folder library.
- If you want your list to be alphabetical once finished, paste your duplicated line into the appropriate spot.
Now all my ducks are absolutely in their rows.
Wikity Widget – to do or to don’t?
I searched everywhere for an improvement on the in-built Stickies widget. A desktop bar napkin to cover all of my scattered A.D.D thoughts. Stickies are suckies.
Enter Wikity Widget.
Fully searchable and delightfully intuitive – it’s a Wikipedia for my head.
Ideal for to-do lists or brilliant ideas you’re not quite sure what to do with, it remains open to the wiki page you used last.
FrameUp!
A picture frame widget that can be resized, customised and DOESN’T RESIZE ITSELF AFTER TURNING OFF THE COMPUTER. So simple – so rare – so putting an embarrassing photo of my brother in it.
WebCams – Framed
Pick a webcam of your choosing – though how you could better Vancouver’s katkam, I can’t fathom.
In Safari, click ‘File’, then ‘Open in Dashboard’. Select the area you want and then – in Dashboard – add a frame.
It updates in real time so I never miss a sunset – even when travelling.
Bon weekend mes petits-choux.
Permission to do nothing and call it research
Chocolate cake on Tuesday… wine – and plenty of it – on Thursday. Am I good to you or what?
Playing Business Blog Scattergories a few months ago, I recommended the movie Bottle Shock for small businesses. It’s an improbable romp across every emotion known to the self-employed. Vital watching as, believe you me, you’ll relate in spades.
4 things to know:
- BYO grain of salt – you’ll have to suspend disbelief while they sell the idea that chardonnay turned the wine world on its head.
- Prepare to want, need and yeaaaarn for guacamole – this movie does for organic foodies what a porn commercial does to a lonely teenage boy. You’ll want and need it now.
- Understand that Napa Valley will top your must-visit list. Chardonnay snobbery aside, it’s just drop dead.
- It’s an Apollo 13 with wine – you know the ending will come good, you just have to wait for the cast to weather a few sleepless nights.
Rent it anyway.
For this winery, business is bad. Beat-up-your son-and-fire-your-only-competent-employee bad. The owner even puts his suit back on and heads back to corporate land to grovel for his old job, something this freelancer recognises as a worst-case scenario.
The protagonist enters a contest he hasn’t a chance of winning. His father, the owner, has already given up, knowing he shouldn’t have….and yet….AND YET!!! Of course they bloody win.
If it’s as hot in your city as it is in mine right now, this is a great summer movie to watch tonight – sprawled across the floor, face shoved in the closest fan. Do NOT forget the snacks. If you don’t start with a bucket of guacamole in front of you, well, don’t come crying to me.
So crash out and watch it. Wake up tomorrow, goofy grin plastered, and ask yourself what crazy venture you can tackle today – never expecting in a million years it will come good.
To draw on a recent Royal Caribbean commercial – ‘Why not?‘
Why not.
Is your tweeting out of hand? 2 tools for social media addiction
Finally! Twitter’s getting some bad press as a productivity killer.
Billed as the social medium, a bloody golden ticket to entrepreneurial success, I’ve cynically sat back and waited: “where’s the other side of the coin?”
The thing about tweeting? It’s annoying. Sit by a tree full of noisy birds – whether sparrows, crows or pigeons (do pigeons roost in trees?) – and it won’t take long for their racket to drive you out of your head.
“SHUDDAAAAAP!!!”
Funnily, applications are popping up to solve social media addictions with yet more technology. If you fancy life in a quieter world but are uncertain how to cut the cord, here are 2 babysitters to try – 1 stupid, 1 quite promising (if you use Firefox).
One to ignore
You’re 3 years old. You want cookies. Grown-up in charge has them. What would happen if he or she said to you,
“I’m hiding the cookies in this cupboard next to this convenient stool. But you can’t have any.”
Exactly. A feeble fix.
KeepMeOut naively asks internet addicts to input their problematic URLs into a form. It then issues a new URL – babysitter attached. The lazy, bored babysitter who doesn’t care and just wants her free pizza ad revenue.
The premise hangs on the fact that you’ll obey and only visit the new URL. Right. Navigate back to the babysitter too quickly and it will warn you that you just visited, please come back later. Riiiight.
That’s not even the funniest part. When it pretends that you’re locked out of what you want (via their pseudo URL), it tells you:
You visited facebook.com less than 60 minutes ago!
Why not come back in 58 minutes, 17 seconds?
Need a break from work? Follow us on Twitter
Subtle! Babysitter says:
“No, small child, you can’t have those cookies that your mum did a lousy job of hiding. You can have them later. For now, how about some crack?“
Daily Blog Tips reviews KeepMeOut.com
One to obey
LeechBlock* is the scary, septugenarian babysitter you know to hide from when her car pulls into the driveway. Once installed, you’re playing by LeechBlock’s rules – like it or lump it. Learn its inner workings: Lifehacker teaches LeechBlock. (*Firefox only)
I had to practice what I preach. As for my e-drug of choice, Facebook, I had my brother change the locks and throw away the key. Detrimental withdrawal affects? None so far. Benefits reported? Books read, actual conversations enjoyed, excercise had.
Come and join me in a Twitterless world, you won’t miss the crow caws.
Upcoming: part 2 – time tracking for the easily distracted
Related posts: Why I won’t Twitter
Like crack, but better: 6 reasons you need desk plants
Flickr: Scott ISH
Happy Earth Day.
Littering your desk right now: Mouse, stapler, phone, cell phone, pens, notebooks, lists, coffee, photos….plants? Here’s hoping.
Whether you work from home (yippee!), run the coolest company on earth or reside (for now, at least) within a cubicle-cage, you need to get yourself some plants. Why have plants? I’ll tell you why.
1. Human shields
If you sit near someone you absolutely cannot stand, a mini-jungle will block your sightline and help you to forget they’re there:
“If he sprays one more bloody can of Lynx (Axe) body spray into the air that I’m trying to breathe, the world is going to end.”
Got cube rage? Cure it with plants.
My aunt, a very practical woman, solved my own office-relations problem:
- She went to Ikea
- Plowed through the unwashed, unfurnished masses
- Walked straight to the garden section
- Bought the biggest, leafiest peace lily available
“Put this,” she said, “directly between the two of you. It’ll block your view of him. Forget he’s there.”
Flickr: JCardinal18
2. Improved air quality
“But what about the can of Axe per day? Isopropyl Myristate! Denatured Ethanol! Hydrofluorocarbons! And butane, too! Gotta love a good neurotoxin in the morning.”
My aunt’s secret powers were deeper than I yet realised – and my new peace lily was a little trooper.
“The peace lily excels in the removal of alcohols, acetone, trichloroethylene, benzene and formaldehyde. Its ability to remove air pollutants and its excellent performance in all categories make it a most valuable houseplant office plant.”*
Until I left the job, that plant took a bullet for me every day. It coughed, spluttered and choked so I didn’t have to. Other, more universal benefits to office plant love?
3. Increased productivity
All sorts of clever Scandinavian scientists have reams and reams of proof that plants in an office environment increase productivity, lower workers’ heart rates and keep them more alert. Why? *Science*.
It’s hard to argue that you’d be better off with less ‘-enes’ in your system. Plants remove traces of common office nasties including benzene, trichloroethylene, not to mention formaldehyde and ammonia.
4. Increased humidity
We’re asking a lot of our eyeballs to stare at a blinding monitor all day. Environments sucked dry from mountains of hot office equipment don’t help. A good jungle helps increase indoor humidity to a more human level – meaning you don’t get sick as often.
5. Prettier
Unless you work at Google, Pixar or from your sun-drenched patio (yea, be jealous), chances are your office furniture has all the character of a Cold War-era nuclear bunker. Add some life.
Flickr: orphanjones
6. Healthy distractions
Though “stress-balls” thankfully died with Y2K hysteria, tending to your desk plants is a valid reason to leave your computer alone for 5 minutes.
So get yourself some plants. The following will all thrive in cubicles, without much sunlight. Will they last longer than you do?
African violet - Easy to keep happy with a few ground rules. Use water that’s sat out overnight and fill up from the bottom drip tray – don’t water the plant or the soil itself.
Bamboo - Idiot-proof. Just keep the vase or jar filled with water.
Diffenbachia - You won’t want this plant if you’ve got small kids or curious pets around – it’s toxic. Actually, slave owners used to punish slaves with diffenbachia: chewing the leaves closes your airways and makes it very hard to breathe. Then again, on ‘Office Space’ days, you’ve always got a weapon close to hand.
And….the 2008 “Office Plant of the Year” (not kidding): Sanseviera
Stay happy! Lauren xx.
Post-script: A great way to get plants for free? Make friends with people who move a lot.
Related posts:
A million girls would kill for THIS job
The best remote office: send Santa my love
*Source: How to grow fresh air: 50 houseplants that purify your home or office. B.C. Wolverton. Penquin Books, 1996.